One Grand Books

I think it shows something about how the world is changing that one of the best—warmest, most inviting, most invigorating—bookstores I’ve experienced is just one tiny town over from where I live in the Catskills.

I can drive fifteen minutes and find Aaron Hicklin, owner and founder, manning the checkout counter. His idea is brilliant (and very twenty-first century). One Grand is an online project with a physical home in Narrowsburg, New York. Aaron invites public figures to share lists of ten books they love. He publishes the lists online, and you can buy them there. Most of the physical store is organized around shelves devoted to lists created by people like Justin Vivian Bond, Trevor Noah, Christopher Guest, Marianne Faithful, and Dev Hynes.

The store is tiny, packed with books, yet still manages to feel open and airy. The design is modern, but feels handcrafted. It blends in the history of the building—for example, the original tin ceilings. Downtown Narrowsburg sits on a cliff above the Delaware River, so if you look when you’re browsing, you see the river flowing, kayaks moving, maybe an eagle soaring. My friend Hilary, who used to own a toy store in the same space, sometimes subs for Aaron at the counter. Confession: I am jealous of Hilary and plan to lobby Aaron for a shift here and there.

I kind of can’t believe One Grand exists. When I’m there, I feel like I did before the Internet, browsing record and bookstores. You can still find some record and bookstores, but before the Internet, they were the only place to find records or books. So browsing needed to be leisurely. You had to explore. Once you left, you lost access. One Grand feels like that, a place that gets you to slow down and explore, slowly, at leisure, with pleasure.

Aaron is editor-in-chief of Out Magazine, so he does this intense job all week and then works in the store all weekend. He’s a marvel. You can feel his love for the place and the project. In his words, “I grew up in a village in England, and small-town bookstores sustained me through so many school vacations and family day trips—there was a kind of magic in losing myself in a bookshop for an hour that I wanted to replicate with One Grand Books. That’s why it had to be located in a small town where it could play the same role in the local community—a place for people to gather, to take their kids, for local authors—as the bookstores of my childhood. We are coming up on our second anniversary, and there’s still not part of it that I don’t love, from ordering the books, to planning the shelves, to chatting to our loyal customers. Although you don’t open a bookstore to get rich, there are rewards aplenty in being surrounded by books and book-loving people.”

Like the people who worked in those record and bookstores back in the day, he takes his time. Aaron seems to delight in long conversations with his customers, about what they’ve just read, what they’ve been meaning to read, what they should read. He knows the books, and he’s curious about the ones he hasn’t read yet.

One Grand hosted the first event for The One You Get. I got to read for an audience of urbane people who live, along with me, in a tiny, beautiful rural community—many of them beloved friends. When I was a kid, I thought I had to be in a city to find my people. Now I’ve found it in the country (a place not so different from the places I grew up).

When Aaron hosts a writer, he lays out a spread of cheese and wine. He does his homework. He hosts a party that feels like an easygoing salon. He’s poised and articulate. He asks pitch-perfect questions without a trace of pretension. He cares and he’s curious. That’s what you feel when you walk into One Grand Books. I love that place. I’m grateful for it.